LAILA LALAMI is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; was on the longlist for the Booker Prize; and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. Lalami's writing appears regularly in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from People, TIME, TODAY, The National, New Scientist, Deseret News, Kirkus, Screen Rant, The OC Register, and Language Arts ""Brilliant...Makes you question why we aren’t doing more to protect our privacy right now."" —Ann Patchett in TheSkimm “A gripping, Kafkaesque foray into an all-too-plausible future where data collection penetrates interior life, The Dream Hotel is also an elegant meditation on identity and what we sacrifice, unthinkingly, for the sake of convenience.” —Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Candy House “The Dream Hotel offers a stark vision of the future—in which America is a surveillance state, ruled by the intertwined forces of capital and government, powered by all-too-fallible algorithm that determines criminality based on citizen’s dreams. That’s plainly a metaphor for extant practices of social control, but Laila Lalami’s extraordinary new novel is more than just a political warning; the book is an exploration of the psyche itself, the strange ungovernable forces of fate and emotion that make us human.” —Rumaan Alam, author of Leave the World Behind ""I loved The Dream Hotel . . . I was utterly gripped, caught up, as if I was living the same nightmare as Sara. It felt terrifyingly and convincingly close."" —Esther Freud, author of Hideous Kinky “Stellar…There are echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale here—as Margaret Atwood does in that book, Lalami builds a convincing near-future dystopia out of current events…But Lalami’s scenario is unique and well-imagined—interspersed report sheets, transcripts, and terms-of-service lingo have a realistic, poignant lyricism that exposes the cruel bureaucracy in which Sara is trapped…And the story exposes the particular perniciousness of big tech’s capacity to exploit our every movement, indeed practically every thought…Striking…An engrossing and troubling dystopian tale.” —Kirkus, starred review ""A stirring dystopian tale of dwindling privacy and freedom in the digital age...The premise calls to mind Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, but Lalami’s version is chillingly original, echoing widespread fears about the abuse of surveillance technology, and she balances high-concept speculative elements with deep character work. This surreal story feels all too plausible."" —Publishers Weekly, starred review